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Hey! so thanks to all the help I've received from you guys, I now have all the parts to build my PC.
One more thing. I have enough for a 64GB Crucial M4 SSD. I would like to use it as my OS boot up and some applications. I want to know, if its worth the 110 I have to spend. Is it worth all the performance that I hear?
I have far from the fastest ssd but I'd still say it's worth it. Mostly because it's one of the parts in your computer where you really can tell a difference in every day use of your computer.
I sometimes wonder about that. I keep my PC fairly clean and maintained and my system already loads up everything except games instantly. How more instant can an SSD make things? My OS is already booted into before my monitor even fades from black!
On December 12 2011 05:58 Medrea wrote: I sometimes wonder about that. I keep my PC fairly clean and maintained and my system already loads up everything except games instantly. How more instant can an SSD make things? My OS is already booted into before my monitor even fades from black!
Either your monitor switches on really slow or you run a 8ghz overclocked bulldozer. Even then, the harddrive will still limit quite a few things including OS boot. Or well, if you run a lightweight linux OS or like windows 98 with a current computer you won't notice much of a difference since there isn't as much to load.
for example
Last edit: 2011-12-12 06:45:00
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Shikyo Finland. December 12 2011 06:50. Posts 20141
On December 12 2011 05:58 Medrea wrote: I sometimes wonder about that. I keep my PC fairly clean and maintained and my system already loads up everything except games instantly. How more instant can an SSD make things? My OS is already booted into before my monitor even fades from black!
Play World of Warcraft or any game that requires to load a lot of textures upon logging on and you'll soon realize your HDD is shit in comparison to a SSD.
The difference is also pretty noticeable if you have a lot of startup programs.
Nope. Just an i5-2500k and Windows 7 which I keep lightweight. I have my POST settings set to skip everything and when i boot in all you catch is one cycle of the icon and then its off to the desktop you go.
I dont have these issues the left computer seems to be having. I dunno I must have captured magic i guess.
For games though makes sense. Yeah but SC2 and the like has you wait upon the other guy so......
ASUS motherboards used to have those mini SSD's on them that had a mini OS. Those were neat if all you wanted to do was browse for a moment. I miss those. What happened to them?
Last edit: 2011-12-12 06:55:43
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Myrmidon United States. December 12 2011 07:01. Posts 8490
Ever regularly load MS Office, Adobe products, CAD programs, A/V capture and editing programs, MATLAB / mathematics programs, Visual Studio / other IDEs, system utilities, web browser, other networking programs?
For just the OS, web browsing (just loading that by itself is not much obviously), multiplayer games which require waiting on others to load, and relatively lightweight programs, it's not a big deal really.
On December 12 2011 07:01 Myrmidon wrote: Ever regularly load MS Office, Adobe products, CAD programs, A/V capture and editing programs, MATLAB / mathematics programs, Visual Studio / other IDEs, system utilities, web browser, other networking programs?
At the same time!? Madness!
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Myrmidon United States. December 12 2011 07:10. Posts 8490
Well, I might load a couple of those things simultaneously...potentially with Microsoft Security Essentials scanning in the background.
To be honest, the worst performance and thrashing can be avoided by just having more than one storage device, even if they're all mechanical. i.e. you don't want a virus scan, a million torrents, and some large transcoding job all hitting the same disc while you're trying to load programs off of it, or it will cry.
Wait... isn't random access like the big important think for loading programs & playing games like World of Warcraft? So am I hearing RAID [meaning 0 or whatever the HDD speed increase one is] only really helps in transferring large files or batches of files? Not in everyday casual/student use?
Edit: I know the difference between what the RAIDs are supposed to do for you. I was just unaware that RAID 0 did not increase certain (what seems to me to be the more important) types of performance and was seeking more information.
Last edit: 2011-12-12 08:32:45
"The victor? Not the highest scoring, nor the best strategist, nor the best tactitian. The victor was he that was closest to the Tao of FFA." -.Praetor
Raid 0 is striping, thats the one that increases speeds. Raid 1 is mirroring, that one makes things slower if anything. There is also Raid 1+0 sometimes incorrectly called Raid 10.
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Myrmidon United States. December 12 2011 09:39. Posts 8490
On December 12 2011 07:58 MisterFred wrote: Wait... isn't random access like the big important think for loading programs & playing games like World of Warcraft? So am I hearing RAID [meaning 0 or whatever the HDD speed increase one is] only really helps in transferring large files or batches of files? Not in everyday casual/student use?
Edit: I know the difference between what the RAIDs are supposed to do for you. I was just unaware that RAID 0 did not increase certain (what seems to me to be the more important) types of performance and was seeking more information.
Maybe "wouldn't help much at all" is a bit too strong, but...having multiple hard drives is not going to help any one of them move the arm to the correct place. Hence to access a different part of the RAID (or single drive), you will still need to wait. Realistically, loading programs--particularly games, what with all the large chunks of assets--will involve some large sequential accesses that would be faster in a RAID (non-1).
So you need to think, for a particular workload, how much time is spent moving the arm to the correct place vs. actually reading or writing data. RAID (non-1) will speed up the actual reading or writing of data, but not the access times. If you need to grab a lot of small files scattered around, then that's bad news for mechanical drives, be they in RAID or not. That's why using a fairly cheap flash memory drive (much slower than SSDs) for ReadyBoost caching can improve performance.
Last edit: 2011-12-12 09:43:05
MisterFred United States. December 12 2011 09:52. Posts 1818
Ok, that makes a lot of "should have been obvious" sense now that you say it. Would the same hold true for SSDs in RAID? Either no benefit in finding the file or even slower since half the file is on two different disks? Most of what I do is relatively simple Acrobat Reader, PowerPoint, Word, and gaming, and it sounds like opening up one of the programs wouldn't benefit from RAID 0, but opening a particularly large .pdf would benefit.
Not that I really need to know, except for dream computer purposes.
"The victor? Not the highest scoring, nor the best strategist, nor the best tactitian. The victor was he that was closest to the Tao of FFA." -.Praetor
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Womwomwom December 11 2011 19:47. Posts 5517
